Honey, Baby, Sweetheart

by Deb Caletti

  More guests arrived. Joe Davis came, bringing a wedding gift wrapped in white paper with silver bells, which Mom opened to reveal a box of chocolates later set on the table and pounced on by the Queens like lions on a zebra carcass. Fowler the librarian arrived with a date, a slim woman with long dark hair and dark eyeliner and a shirt with sleeves made of fishnet. Floozy, Peach whispered in the kitchen. Bernice Rawlins, who worked at the library, was spotted knocking on Miz June’s neighbor’s door, and Mom rushed out to guide her to the right house, the one with all of the cars parked in front of it. Miz June had invited a new suitor, Mr. Kingsley, who arrived in a hat and suit, and Mom invited Lizbeth and Sydney and Libby Wilson. My heart dropped when I saw Libby, batik skirt swinging in a whirl of color as she came in the door. I focused on a pair of plates of appetizers that had previously been shaped like a dragon and a phoenix and now looked like they’d survived a bomb blast.

  Libby was not one for indirect social dramas. She strode directly toward me and took a pinch of my sleeve and drew me to a corner by Miz June’s china cabinet. I studied a cup that looked like it was made from a lettuce leaf, and a miniature tea set with apples on it.

  “Ruby,” Libby said. “Look at me. It’s still me.”

  “That’s the problem.” Her kindness was doing its work, loosening the tears that had gathered in readiness the moment I saw her. The smallest kindness is an arrow in the heart of a guilty person, that I’d learned.

  “Listen,” she said. “Your mother and I have been friends for too long to let this come between us. She called me up on your first day of kindergarten, crying her eyes out.” She reached out to hug me. “I needed a little time, is all.” I put my arms around her, smelled her cinnamon smell.

  “I am so sorry,” I said to her. Tears rolled down my face, landed on her shoulder.

  “I know you are.”

  “I am so, so sorry.”

  “Don’t blow your nose on my dress,” she said, making me laugh. She gave me a squeeze. “Ruby, remember that man I told you about, who I missed my mother’s chemotherapy for?”

  I nodded.

  “He stole my credit card. I got the bill. He went out to dinner a lot, bought a new computer, and a subscription to Christian Computing magazine.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Dead serious.”

  “Jeez.” I thought about this. “Christian Computing?”

  “What I want to know is, how is Christian computing any different than any other computing?” Libby said.

  “Willing to spend more when the Holy Grail comes up for sale on eBay,” Mom said as she came and put her arms around both of us. “Friends,” she said. She put her cheek on Libby’s shoulder.

  Miz June put on some music. A two-record set of Benny Goodman. Chip Jr. watched the needle of the record player collect a ball of dust, and Miz June started to dance with Mr. Kingsley. Anna Bee had worn her hooded sweatshirt with the butterflies on it, and Harold put things in her hood when she wasn’t looking—a napkin, one of Mrs. Wong’s lotus seed buns. Fowler’s girlfriend sat beside him on the settee, petting Beauty with her foot. Lizbeth waltzed Sydney in a circle, as Sydney stuck her tongue out at me. Miz June and Mr. Kingsley were spinning and dancing hard. Mr. Kingsley bumped into the sofa, which bumped into the wall and tipped to an angle Miz June’s painting of the couple in the boat.

  “Oh, my,” Miz June said when the song was over. “You are a marvelous dancer, Mr. Kingsley.”

  He pulled her waist toward him as the music slowed. “And you, my dear, are Ginger Rogers,” he said.

  Joe Davis took my mom’s hand and led her in a dance. She looked happy, and was talking in that tight-lipped way that meant she was trying not to blow her garlic prawn breath on him. She held him there when the song changed to a fast one, and Joe Davis stomped too hard and skidded the needle of the record player, making everyone miss the beat for a moment. Mrs. Wong took Chip Jr. out on the floor for a spin, and he wiggled his hips and stepped on the cat’s tail when Mrs. Wong spun him around. Sydney, Lizbeth, Mom, and I formed a line and kicked our legs cancan style.

  I imagined Lillian and Charles sitting peacefully on their deck in Carmel, looking at the ocean, touched by its salty breeze as we sang and toasted them with champagne and ate a real wedding cake that Harold made. I imagined them holding hands in sweet quiet as we danced, danced.

  “Jeez, Poe, what are you watching?” Poe sat upright on the couch, looking straight at the television, where there was some soap opera couple half naked in bed. She had her soap opera tongue down his soap opera throat. Poe turned to look at me for a moment and then kept watching.

  The phone rang. In the three weeks that we’d been back, Travis Becker had called four times. It gave me a perverse pleasure to see his name on the caller ID and to ignore it. I wondered if he could sense me there on the other end, my heart lurching, training my newly strong self to look at his name and see what I should: something ugly and dangerous, a cigarette butt, an ambulance siren, a slick road, a poisonous spider best hit with a shoe.

  But it wasn’t Travis Becker on the phone this time. It was Charles Whitney’s daughter, Joelle. Lillian was in the hospital. She’d had another stroke. She was in intensive care.

  Mom was expected home from work soon, but I called her there anyway and told her. Then I went into Chip Jr.’s room, where he sat on the floor with Mom’s old magic kit that she’d had since she was a kid laid out in front of him—orange cups, green dragon coin case, cards, and string.

  “Check this out,” he said. He held up a dollar bill and then rolled it up. He stuck a small square of purple scarf down inside it, opened the dollar to reveal that the scarf was gone.

  “Wow, that was great,” I said. It was.

  “Now I’ll make it come back,” he said.

  “I’ve got some bad news. About Lillian.” He stopped his trick. Looked up at me and waited. “She’s in the hospital.”

  “Why?”

  “She had another stroke.”

  “She’s not dead, though,” he said.

  “No,” I said. “But she’s not doing very well.”

  “She wouldn’t be dead. She just got to California.”

  We had a quiet dinner, did the dishes. The dishwasher, squeaking and groaning with its odd rhythm, was the only noisy thing. We opened the door and a rush of steam poured out. We used three hot bowls for ice cream, the scoops quickly melting a soft layer into the bowl. Mom changed into her robe. We played a halfhearted game of Masterpiece while Poe sat in the box lid like a cat. By the end of the evening, Mom had gotten another phone call. Lillian had died, just two hours before. It seemed unbelievable that in one place someone could be opening a steamy dishwasher, and in another someone could be dying.

  Chip Jr. sobbed against my mother, into her terry cloth shoulder. She held him in one arm, reached her other out to me, and took my hand.

  “It’s not how it’s supposed to be,” he cried.

  This is what I know: We are all a volume on the shelf of the Nine Mile Falls Library, a story unto ourselves, never possibly described with one word or even very accurately with thousands. A person is never as quiet or unrestrained as they seem, or as bad or good, as vulnerable or as strong, as sweet or as feisty; we are thickly layered, page lying upon page, behind simple covers. And love—it is not the book itself, but the binding. It can rip us apart or hold us together. My mother has always said that a book is worthy of a strong embrace, but, too, you must be gentle with one. Careful in whose hands you put it. Layers, by their nature, are fragile things.

  We gathered with the Queens once more, this time in Joe Davis’s church. An enlarged photo of Lillian holding a red sno-cone sat in a frame on a table in the front of the church, next to a stack of Charles Whitney’s books and a vase of white roses. There was a note from Charles, in his strong, tender handwriting: Know that, whatever has happened, you have all done a marvelous and meaningful thing. I will always believe that she waited for us to he together
before she let go. It was the happiest few weeks of my life, and she died holding my hand.

  My mother read a Robert Browning poem, about love found and lost and remembered, and Joe Davis talked about God in a way that made Him sound kind and understanding and there for us. The church was full of Lillian’s friends and bittersweet feelings and the sound of Harold blowing his nose. Somewhere in Carmel that same day, on a cliffside dotted with wind-frozen cypress trees, Charles Whitney was saying a final good-bye to his soul mate.

  My father called just before we were to go back to school. Chip Jr.’s new school clothes were already laid out on his floor, like a flattened cartoon character, in readiness. My father wanted us to come and visit, Chip Jr. and me. There was someone we should meet, he said. A sister. A baby girl. Someone who shared some part of us, though who could say which part. Eye color? A way with words? Some obscure piece of genetic material that sat quietly in our blood? Family was the people around you who you loved and who loved you back. When that phone call came, I was more related to Mrs. Wong than a stranger I hadn’t even met. The first definition for the word relative is “relevant,” after all.

  “Call me when you’re heading home,” Mom said.

  “You know we’re coming back tomorrow,” I said.

  “I still want you to call. That way I’ll know to worry if it gets late.”

  I sighed, but I didn’t really mind. I was glad, actually, that she was in full mother mode, with both feet firmly on the ground.

  “I’m bringing my lucky fossil,” Chip Jr. said.

  “Full tank of gas and a lucky fossil,” I said. “We’re set.”

  We played the license plate game, talked about birds and how they decided who was the leader of the triangle, stopped for some fries. Chip Jr. read the directions to Dad’s house. While I was there with Dad and his fiancée, Cilla, and baby, I kept trying to make the dad I knew fit with this new place and new people. Dad’s same voice, a refrigerator full of foods I didn’t know he liked. Dad’s coat, in a closet I’d never seen before, hanging next to strange coats. Dad’s familiar hands holding a baby that smelled like peaches, his own hair smelling like a shampoo I didn’t know the brand of. His fiancée—the word was strange enough—with a high laugh and a face much plainer than I imagined, a Midwest accent that said she’d had a whole life somewhere else before then.

  Chip Jr. and I whispered in the dark, glad for each other’s familiarity. We said good-bye the next morning, my father expressing his desire to see us more, as if this baby made him remember that we were here too. It would take many more trips before it would feel right that my father knew how to work that particular remote control in that particular house, mow that lawn, sing to that baby, Olivia, who would finally become herself to us.

  We called Mom when we headed home, just after we crossed the state line. Chip Jr. and I both squeezed inside the phone booth.

  “Guess where we are,” I said to Mom.

  “In a Mexican jail,” she said.

  “Nope.”

  “I give up, then.”

  “The same phone booth outside the Denny’s we went to with the Queens. The one you called Mrs. Wong and Joe from.”

  “Tell her a big fat guy is sitting in our booth. Tell her he’s eating the same bacon cheeseburger she ate,” Chip Jr. said.

  “Ha, ha, very funny. I heard that,” she said.

  I craned my neck to look through the windows blasted with advertisements for breakfast specials. “He’s not kidding,” I said.

  “Do you see Randy the Colossally Cool Waiter?”

  “Mmm, not yet,” I said.

  “How’d it go?” she asked. “How was the baby?”

  “Fine. Cute. Cilla was a lot plainer than I thought she’d be.” Avoid the word fiancée. Avoid the fact that Cilla was a lot nicer than I’d thought too. We’d had a long history of protecting each other, my mother and I. I’m sure we’d keep protecting each other forever. We cared too much for each other to have between us the recklessness of complete honesty.

  “So get home safely,” she said.

  “We will, as long as we get out of this phone booth before we catch some deadly disease,” I said. The phone felt sticky, and there was a little nest of cigarette butts in one corner that my shoe was keeping its distance from, like those circles of kids you worry are doing drugs just outside of school property. Someone had written JASON ROCKS in permanent marker on the glass; another had crossed out ROCKS and replaced it with SUCKS DIX. If you are going to be crude, in my opinion, you at least ought to spell correctly.

  “Put your brother on for a minute,” she said. “And I’ll let you go. See you soon, and drive carefully.”

  “I will.”

  I stepped out of the booth, examined the juniper plants and the newspaper boxes full of real estate magazines. When I went back to the booth, Chip Jr. was holding the receiver to his ear but wasn’t saying anything.

  “What are you doing?” I mouthed.

  Chip Jr. held his hand over the receiver. “Poe was sitting by Mom so she put him on the phone. I’m listening to him breathe.”

  He held the phone out to me. I heard what sounded like a loud gust of static from a television, quiet, and then the gust of static again.

  Chip Jr. took the phone back. “I missed you, boy,” he said.

  School started. I kept going to the Casserole Queen’s book club. The surprise was, no one noticed that I was no longer who I had always been. At least not at first. But it didn’t matter. I felt it. A core of something solid, not the water or sand or clay that had been there before, but something firm and permanent.

  There were other surprises. Joe Davis had returned to his home very late one night from a date with my mother, only to see Anna Bee running across the church lawn, holding up her pant legs from the dewy grass, her socks flashing white in the darkness. LET DOG BE YOUR GUIDE.

  “Is he sure it was her?” I asked Mom.

  “Well, he’s sure it was her that he saw. Unless he catches her again with black letters in her hand, it still could be half the town. For a while, Joe thought it was half the town, everyone taking turns on different days.”

  “Anna Bee, though? That’s just too strange.” I always thought it was Renny Powell, the guy that helped Joe with the church grounds.

  “It fits, if you think about it. Anna Bee, animal lover, naturalist. Rebellious vandal.” She laughed. “He doesn’t want to know who it is, you realize. He has a great fondness for the dog vandal.”

  “So maybe she was just doing tai chi on the lawn.”

  “At midnight,” my mother said.

  The air was starting to have that fall feeling—I’m not sure what it is, because even if it is a hot leftover summer day, you still feel it—that sense of things ending and others beginning at the same time. There is some kind of resignation in the air, a bittersweet smell that comes, maybe just as the leaves begin to change, before you even notice the subtle shift in colors that will burst like wildfire onto the hillsides just a week or two later. What I am sure of, though, is that even if we didn’t have the calendar, or the trees, to help us, we would sense that it was still early September, because September comes to you like a pull in your stomach. And the feeling got to me a little, I confess, as I walked home that day, one of the early days back at school my senior year. That pull makes you want to find a reason for it, and as I passed Travis Becker’s house, which I passed with focused disinterest the days prior, I looked long and hard at those gates and decided again that I did not want to go through them. Sometimes a decision is not one monumental event, but many small, slightly unsteady ones.

  Instead I went to Moon Point and watched the paragliders, who would still have another month of good weather, if they were lucky. The day was too autumn-glorious to resist soaring in, I guess, and the parking lot and roadside was filled with cars, including the funny van with the whale and I LOVE POTHOLES bumper sticker. I sat down and watched them awhile, listening to the flapping, book pages turnin
g, turning with sharp speed, and watching them make butterfly circles against the mountainside. I watched two people land, their parachutes collapsing sumptuously around them once their feet touched ground, their faces so exhilarated that it made you feel it too.

  I walked to the small house that acted as the office of the paragliding school. As Charles Whitney said, when your life changes, a definite action is called for. I had never been there before, even though I had come to the field so many times. The door was half open. I was surprised to see the whale van guy behind the desk, talking on the phone. I couldn’t believe it was him. He was wearing a T-shirt with the school logo on it, a heart with wings. I waited for him to finish.

  “I know you,” he said when he got off the phone.

  “I know you.”

  “The girl with the shiny hair and the good sense of humor.”

  “The guy with the squirting whale van. You work here.”

  “I do.”

  “That is so great.”

  He grinned. “I think so too.” He nodded at me as if we both understood something about each other. “Well,” he said finally. “What can I do for you?”

  Here is what happened then. I heard the voices of the Queens. I heard the clinking of their glasses, raised in a toast. To adventure, they said.

  And I listened.

  “I want to fly,” I said.

  Deb Caletti is the author of The Queen of Everything; Honey, Baby, Sweetheart (a National Book Award finalist); Wild Roses; The Nature of Jade; and The Fortunes of Indigo Skye.